Tropic of Capricorn

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Review by Peter Weissman, 2009-07-02

I thought this was Miller's best ... until, two-thirds of the way through, he began rhapsodizing about world history and overindulging in the kind of philosophical rumination that can drive is fans crazy, and not in a good way. Much as I like Henry Miller, it's clear that deep thinking was never his strong suit.

Miller guided me to other writers--Celine, Knut Hamsun, Anais Nin, Blaise Cendrars, among others--as he did for many others. In my case, out of an inclination toward history, he turned me on to Oswald Spengler, with whom I was so taken that I spent a year reading and rereading Decline of the West, an obsession culminating in an essay that appeared in the old Los Angeles Free Press.

Here's my Capricorn theory: Given evidence that Miller was similarly captivated by Spengler back then, I'm guessing that out of admiration, and the unconscious imitation a writer manifests when encountering an influence--something I know a bit about--Decline of the West interfered with what Henry Miller does best: presenting an adventurous everyday life in flowing, literate, often humorous detail. Which is why, I believe, Capricorn fell down.

Still, it's certainly not bad.I Think, Therefore Who Am I?

Review by Chris, 2009-06-09

Henry Miller was capable of brilliant story-telling and, as this book shows, he could also be a tremendous bore.

There are big parts of the book where the story-telling is first rate. He gives a very vivid picture of the vulgar and rather brutal working class milieu in which he spent the first 3 or 4 decades of his life. He makes his experiences and the people he associated with come alive, though one wonders to what extent the experiences are real and to what extent they are made up. One can well imagine a working class male in Brooklyn in the early 20th century having the experiences and thoughts that Miller portrays himself and his associates having. The first and largest episode in the book is Miller's life as manager of a telegraph company's message delivery service. Then there are other episodes in Miller's life that are detailed, going back to his childhood.

It helps Miller in his story-telling that he is completely un-restrained in his use of language. He uses every four letter word imaginable and describes sexual escapades in extremely graphic language. He uses the four letter word that begins with "c" to describe the private area on the lower front part of a woman's body. He frequently refers to this private area throughout the book and his fondness for accessing it. The account of the period when Miller was the messenger service manager is laced with constant references to the sexual encounters that Miller and his buddies pursued (even though most of them were married at the time). Miller portrays himself in this book as a raging sex maniac. Let me give a summary of some of the sexual experiences detailed in the novel. For instance there is his piano teacher. He is in his mid-teen years and she is in her mid-20's. He is seized with an intense desire to access this teacher's private area and one day while they are seated at the piano, he makes some groping gestures in the direction of the private area. She thoroughly rebukes him but not long after, she encounters him outside sitting down in an isolated area. He lunges at her again but she successfully resists him, saying she doesn't want to do it there. They walk to another isolated area, I believe near a lake, and there she attacks him and apparently the subsequent copulation is quite intense. Then there is Rita. Rita is the sister of his friend Maxie and Henry intensely wishes to have a sexual encounter with Rita but Maxie does not approve of that. Henry runs into Rita one day and they go back to the vestibule of her family apartment and have mind-blowing sex on the floor. Henry is very proud that he was able to fornicate with Maxie's sister "right under" the nose of Maxie. Miller provides fairly vivid description of the placement of his hands and some other details that occurred during this vestibule fornication. Then there is a young gal who I believe Miller calls Agnes. We are introduced to Agnes in a story that seems to take place during Henry's mid-to-late teen years. One day, Henry, Agnes and another girl play naked tag by the river. Agnes and Henry also have other experiences together. For instance, they copulate in various public places, including public telephone booths. Another activity of Henry and Agnes takes place on street cars. On the street-car, Agnes, wearing nothing under her dress, lifts up the dress and sits on Henry's lap and.....you get the picture. Agnes also tells Henry the story how she bullied her brother into running his fingers around her.....um........There is another more graphic allusion to incest in this book. Henry has a young friend/protégé, an aspiring teenage thief/con-man named Curley. Curley appears impressed with Henry's skill in hustling money from friends and acquaintances; Henry does this because he is always dead broke. Anyway, we learn that Curley is involved in a sexual relationship with his aunt. His parents were circus folk and apparently abandoned him and he was forced to live with this aunt and this aunt feels that.....etc.

These brutal and nasty stories of life in working class New York in the early 20th century are not all related to sex though there is a lot of that. It is from the perspective of a working class male possessed of a chauvinism not untypical of the time. Women don't figure much in this story except as actors in sex scenes. There are episodes where sex plays no part, for example the story of Miller's father's embrace of religion in his elderly years as well as the excellent and vivid stories about some of Miller's childhood friends and acquaintances.

The episodes are sometimes unpleasant and nasty but very real and it is unfortunate that Miller has to break up the power of this novel by placing long rambling incoherent mystical discourses in between the episodes of the book and especially in the last part of the book. These psychedelic tirades really get tiresome and almost completely ruin the book. Tropic of Cancer, thankfully, has little of this gibberish.

Review by R. Parrent, 2008-09-12

I was looking forward to reading this book, but unfortunately most of it was self indulgent filler with absolutely no payoff. Sure, blinding light would occasionally cut through the floating gray clouds of endless paragraphs, but for the most part this book seemed more like a literary endurance test. The beginning piqued my curiosity, but reading the rest of the book made me feel like I just wanted to get my money's worth. I think the most depressing thing about the book was toward the end when Miller was quoting the surrealists, ha ha, and I loved those quotes and it made me want to explore Breton and such, but they stood in harsh contrast to Miller's own writing. Miller seems like an interesting name dropper, a coach of literature that isn't so hot on his own two feet; but then again, I haven't read all of his work, but I'm wondering if it's worth the effort. Henry Miller seems to touch upon things that have already been done better by other writers: Dostoevski was a better rambling, ranting madman writing in a common vernacular; Rimbaud executed the dynamic between bitter nihilistic despair to innocence and hope better; and Lautreamont was much more obscene and capable of creating perfect, surreal, jarring imagery.

Review by J. Hovey, 2008-05-28

I may have a soft spot for this book because it's the first of his I read, but this comes off as no less than his finest hour. The first fifty or so pages are almost unbeatable. Miller nails the very essence of the American character down with an unflinching vitriol that hasn't really been matched in anything else I've read. Given how banal much of the literature that comprises the curriculum in public schools is, I was somewhat shocked and completely mesmerized by someone exposing the degradation and absence of ethics in the the modern workplace so openly. Reading it well after the year 2000, it still was spot on in spite of taking place in 1920s New York.

Sure, much has changed since then. Racism and sexism have become more veiled and subtle, but are still present in oblique and diluted forms. On closer inspection, I have come to think that the book tacitly makes the point that racism always was partially a red herring. The real enemy was a system that treated people as mere statistics and robbed us all of our humanity.

A lot of people like Cancer better, but I have to disagree. This book is everything he was trying to do in Cancer and then some. Whatever style he was trying to formulate in Cancer, which while still very good basically only described a sort of expatriate hipster aesthetic. That isn't without its merits, but Capricorn was the book that looked not only looked America right in its hideous face, but saw Miller making "the only true journey which is to the self" (paraphrased). The sexual aspect of the book gets overplayed again and again, but it was only part of a larger transparency in Miller's writing. He wrote graphically and directly about sex in a time when it was utterly unacceptable to do so in popular discourse. His ability with the English language is largely unmatched in American prose. It was in this book, where he wanted to lay out his thoughts in the most naked manner possible, that he hit full stride stylistically.

Unsentimental, deliriously descriptive, and brilliant.

Review by Diane Schirf, 2007-10-13

Like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn is part autobiography, part memoir, part polemic, part fiction, part fantasy, and part poetry, written in near stream of consciousness as Miller experiences one epiphany after another.

As with the prior book, Miller's ramblings are the source and the result of his efforts to define himself as an artist. Other contemporary American writers, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald, seem fascinated by their significance as artists and by the future importance of their art. In the Tropic books, Miller makes his consciousness of himself as an artist the subject of his art. In some ways, reading the Tropic books is like watching someone obsessively paint his self-portrait over and over, all with the title, Self-Portrait of the Artist.

According to Miller, "Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show . . . The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within, however, you grow hard as a diamond." He says he "was perhaps the first Dadaist in America, and I didn't know it. Nobody understood what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy." The focus is not on the art (what he is writing about) but on himself as the artist, with an anonymous readership ("nobody," "they") who doesn't understand him. As if his own belief in himself as an artist were not enough to convince us, he quotes a series of friends who insist that he should become a writer.

While Miller lacks objectivity and security, he has moments of insight into the current human condition. "Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual," following an anecdote about sour rye, is a brilliantly simple description of a world he sees as cold and mechanical, when progress and war have robbed men of their humanity. "The smell of a dead horse . . . is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals . . . the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple . . . is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory . . ." Honest death and decay, "after life," are better than "death from the roots, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy . . ."

Superior to Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn still shows a lack of discipline, or a contempt for it. Separating the poetic gems are long, rambling passages that are sometimes pointless and sometimes nonsensical. He continues the use of incoherent metaphors such as, "Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up." Sometimes his attempts to play with words and prose are more childish than literary or artistic, for example, " . . . deeper and deeper in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep's sweet sleep," and so on.

Tropic of Capricorn is uneven, ranging from the lively and the lovely to the self-conscious and tedious. It's unfortunate that Miller expended so much effort trying to convince the reader (and himself) of his status as an evil monster and artist (perhaps with the idea that they are synonymous) and so little culling the irrelevant and refining the rest. Miller's perspective and vision are interesting, even compelling, when not muddied by his fascination with himself and by his need to stand out.